Hollywood Should Pay Attention to Christopher Nolan's 'Dunkirk'

In general there's an increasing problem of a glut of excellent entertainment. Movies are in a bit of a slump, but there are still several good films a year. TV's probably the best it's ever been—it's nuts how good it is. Video games are excellent and relatively cheap. There's an ongoing board gaming renaissance. Good or great music for almost every taste comes out every year. Then there's the fact that it's all hyper-available, including much of the back catalogue for all of human recorded/written entertainment. Almost no wait. Just press a button or three and enjoy. You can find a credible top-ten (or top-1000...) for almost any kind of thing you care to and the only impediment to experiencing at least 80-90% of them will be time.

The hard part now isn't identifying and gaining access to great entertainment, it's figuring out which great entertainment you skip in favor of other great entertainment. If you remember what the world was like pre-Internet, this is a really weird situation.

That film isn't exactly having a golden age right now makes it easy (nearly necessary, given how good everything else is) to largely avoid it, even if it isn't terrible, especially since cinema-going is one of the more expensive options for mass entertainment.

Of course they continue to sell plenty of tickets, so maybe this post is just a bunch of crap.

...or they could go the other way and lower the cost (and convenience) of admission so people wouldn't mind going to an offbeat or strange film on a lark.

I'd recommend trying an Alamo Drafthouse - they're super gung-ho about enforcing the rules that lead to an enjoyable movie-watching environment.

> I just don't know why I would ever enjoy the theater experience again, when it's just so damn difficult to enjoy a good film.

I apparently have Misophonia[1]. Movie theaters are nearly a kind of torture chamber for me. I've had to devise an approach for avoiding the super obnoxious popcorn chompers (the kind you can hear from the other side of the theater).

After years and years of desperately trying to figure out how to control such a thing bothering me, it was a relief to discover there's not much I can do about it. It's apparently neurologically hard-wired. For me it applies to a very narrow set of noises, one of which just happens to be loud/gross eaters (gulping, slurping, noises from eating with your mouth wide open, etc).

The rapid improvement in home theater tech has been particularly welcomed. I only go to theaters now when it's a movie I really want to experience super-sized.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06annoy.html

To be fair though, Interstellar has really awful sound production. You cannot blame the theatre for that movie. Many theatres actually had signs up explicitly saying that the ear-shatteringly loud music drowning out the dialogue is they way the movie was produced, so don't blame them.

And what awful music it was. Just a terrible, terrible soundtrack. They really should not have let Hans Zimmer play with his organ.

> Add to the fact that the acoustics in theaters are still never quite right (it's often LOUD but doesn't envelop you)...

It's a pet peeve of mine as well - the acoustics tend to be awful. I believe if you're at an IMAX theater they're supposed to meet some important minimum standards. No idea how true that really is, but I know none of the IMAX theaters I've been to had bad audio.

It probably makes me sound incredibly crotchety to say so but one of the things I dislike about going to the theaters is that the audio volume is often too high for my liking.

I've seen analyses that suggest that 70mm is roughly equivalent to 8K resolution, once digitized. Given that 8K cameras exist, and would presumably allow as much shooting as you can attach auxiliary storage capacity, what's the advantage to shooting in analog 70mm instead, especially if you're going to end up digitizing anyway?

See, this is exactly why I don't care about IMAX. What difference does a little bit more resolution make, when it's a simple shot with two people talking to each other? How does that benefit from a screen so big that I can hardly see it all without turning my head?

I get that there's a resolution increase, but when was the last time you went to the movies and thought, "This picture just isn't sharp enough"?

I live next to one of like 8 laser projection IMAX theaters. If I can't watch an eye candy movie at that theatre I prefer to watch at home since my home theatre on average out performs most screens.

How you can walk into a theatre and have it be out of focus I can't even begin to imagine. Even the sound is worse. This is an industry that needs some weeding.

My coworkers tease me because I don't watch trailers. I insist they spoil too many things. I watch trailers after I've seen the movie, and they almost all have terrible spoilers.

But at the same time I can see how they build hype. I think my favorite trailer is The Force Awakens, even though it spoils a ton. It's an incredibly made trailer, with the sound editing and visuals.

What is the image supposed to demonstrate?

Agreed on the over-revealing trailers! For Nolan movies, just watch the teasers. Interstellar and Dunkirk both had excellent ones, that don't really reveal anything. I deliberately avoided the full trailers for each.

Seeing The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen was particularly impressive because of the cuts from "normal" screen size to full IMAX - they really were breathtaking.

Anything that "blunts" war or portrays it as anything besides "the worst living nightmare possible" is a lie. There of course is wonderful art to be made that acknowledges that fact - Guernica, Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker - but to me, it's critical to acknowledge this. The extras who are casually shot in action scenes aren't extras in the real world, it's an act of actual murder that is abhorrent in the real world.

One of humanities great moments happened after WW2, or maybe Vietnam: the realization that war is not noble, that "pro patria mori" is bullshit, and that no one really wins. Our media must reflect this fact, even if it seems to have lost touch with reality everywhere else. It's critical to the discourse and to our continued survival.

Well, let's flip it around. Would Bridge on the River Kwai have been a better movie if it depicted gruesome carnage?

Most "IMAX" screens are not what most people think of when they think of IMAX. Rather than 70mm film projected onto multi-story screens, they're just using an IMAX-developed digital projection system and a slightly-larger-than-standard screen. The result can be disappointing if you go in expecting real IMAX and get the inferior mass-market alternative instead.

IMAX deliberately lumps their 70mm system and their digital system together under the "IMAX" brand, without any additional information to help people distinguish between the two. It's hard not to think that this is done intentionally, to use the brand value their large-format system has built up over the years to sell tickets for the comparatively more lackluster digital system.

3D movies are mostly just irritating to me, because I have strabismus and only process input from one eye at a time, so I can't see stereoscopic 3D. With the glasses on, it just looks like a normal movie to me. Everyone gasps when something flies at the camera, and I don't get it.

Though I am glad they upgraded to polarized 3D glasses from the old red/blue kind. I couldn't watch movies at all with those--I either saw just the red or just the blue.

> I hate 3D movies because it causes eye strain.

The days for this crap have to be numbered, don't they? Nobody manufactures 3D TVs anymore and the latest 3DS comes without the 3D capability. The fad seems to be on its way out, finally.

Empire Strikes Back for me. Amazing.

> Despite an increase in 3-D releases, the box-office market for that particular upcharge is falling as 3-D has gone from being a special experience to a perfunctory feature for every blockbuster.

The problem is the directors using 3D just couldn't resist the overused trope of having an arrow (or spears, in the case of Star Trek: Out of Darkness) fly out of the screen at the audience. I dunno, maybe it was intended as an homage to the old Anaglyph 3-D movies, but it fell flat.

I saw all three Star Wars, all three Raiders, ET, Close Encounters, Burton's Batman, Ghostbusters, etc, etc at the HUGE theater at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL. I swear the screen was the size of a football field and there were seats for 2k people.

It was glorious.